Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production by Jason Puskar PDF

This ebook argues that language and literature actively produced probability within the overdue 19th and early 20th centuries by way of categorizing accidents and losses as blameless of layout. motor vehicle collisions and occupational accidents grew to become "car injuries" and "industrial accidents." in the course of the post-Civil warfare interval of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, probability used to be an summary enemy opposed to which society may possibly unite. via generating likelihood, novels via William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine eco-friendly, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped determine new modes of collective interdependence. likelihood this is attached now not with the aggressive individualism of the Gilded Age, yet with very important revolutionary and social democratic reforms, together with advancements in coverage, which had lengthy hired coincidence narratives to form its personal "mutual society." Accident Society unearths the level to which American collectivity has depended—and keeps to depend—on the literary creation of chance.

The hot Cambridge spouse to Herman Melville offers well timed, severe essays on Melville's vintage works. The essays were specifically commissioned for this quantity and supply an entire review of Melville's occupation. Melville's significant novels are mentioned, in addition to a number his brief fiction and poetry, together with overlooked works ripe for rediscovery.

This primary prolonged literary description and research of Emerson's journals, argues that they, and never his essays, are Emerson's masterpiece, constituting one of many maximum commentaries on nineteenth-century the United States via one in all our such a lot acute formal intelligences. First constructing the serious method had to research the magazine shape, a style lengthy overlooked by way of literary students, Rosenwald is going directly to think about how Emerson the diarist chanced on his shape and what shape he came across.

This ebook examines why a number of American literary and highbrow icons turned pioneering students of the Hispanic global after Independence and the warfare 1812. At this significant time for the younger republic, those talented american citizens came upon idea in an not going position: the collapsing Spanish empire and used it to form their very own country's identification.

Barbara Kingsolver's books have bought thousands of copies. "The Poisonwood Bible "was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her paintings is studied in classes starting from English-as-a-second-language periods to seminars in doctoral courses. but, beforehand, there was fairly little scholarly research of her writings.

Extra resources for Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

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One of the things I have come to admire in these writers is their love of variety, which they indulge even at the expense of formal elegance or narrative cohesion. Aesthetic variety, formal inconsistency, and narrative irregularity are the very tools these writers often use to hammer out chance. To be true to its sources, a literary history of chance must not fail to be a little haphazard too. c ha p ter 1 The Insurance of the Real william dean howells Just fifteen years after its destruction by fire, Chicago erupted in violence again, but this time the violence was hardly represented as accidental.

That is, part of what Howells seems to recognize in Hazard is that the moral underpinnings of romantic fiction, with its polarized account of virtue and vice, can be countered by realist fiction’s determined refusal even to conduct the kinds of inquiries that might lead to any assessment of blame. By refusing to solve crimes and produce culprits, and by refusing even to try to do so, Hazard inflicts on the reader the same aggravating uncertainties and dissatisfactions that trouble its characters.

A person who thinks her house is in imminent danger of burning would call the fire department, but she would call an insurance agent only after making a much more general concession about her inability to prevent such fires over the long term. Millions of Americans were making exactly that concession in the late nineteenth century. As a result, it makes sense to think of insurance as creating a culture of accidents rather than simply subsisting within one. It makes even more sense to think of insurance as constituting new kinds of subjects who are willing and able to tolerate those conditions, rather than simply recruiting them.